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Comment by ajphdiv | Hacker News Reader

A big performance increase by putting the OS on a SSD. The read/write speed is much better than using the SD card. It takes a little tweaking to get the SSD to boot on the rpi 4, but can be done. Basically the SD card gets used a bootloader.

howto:

https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-gu...

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Yes, to be honest, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably have gone with the SSD and tried to boot off of it directly.

At the time of writing however, the pi was an experiment and I figured that I would just have an extra drive to store stuff if the pi did not work out. In any case, since it's not being used as a regular computer, the SD card works fine, even when compiling stuff :)

has the disadvantage of needing the SSD (which is probably more expensive than the pi?). here is something I ran across a while back, that if I understand correctly, uses a ramdisk + overlayfs to make the whole thing faster: https://github.com/cattlepi/cattlepi

Here's my build

    $55 Pi 4 (4gb)
    $8  Official USB charger
    $25 Argon One case (could also get acrylic + ICE tower)
    $10 microSD card
    $12 Sata to usb adapter
    $40 Kingston 240gb SSD (we can't do over 500mb/s anyway)
    

    $120 Total

You get a significant performance boost switching to a 64-bit OS. aarch64 has better SIMD guarantees, hardware AES (over 10x faster), double the registers, and generally more optimizable due to the more streamlined ISA. I haven't tested it yet, but in-memory compression could potentially help with the 4gb RAM limit.

Pardon my ignorance. Does your bare SSD sit outside without any case (connected to the Pi via the SATA to USB cable)? Does it need any kind of heat dissipation mechanism (or cooling) at all?

That's up to you. You can find USB3 SATA enclosures on Amazon for around the $12 mark. There's not a big heat dissipation issue in my experience and a Pi probably isn't exactly going to be taxing the drive very much.

If you don't mind the terrible $/gb ratio, you can even get USB3 thumbdrives that use an SSD.

with 4gigs of ram running the OS from a ramdisk would probably make it fly (even faster than the ssd ;))

Perhaps, but I do web development and Chrome really eats the RAM.

I have a similar setup, but also require a powered USB3 hub to drive SSD. The power from the Pi wasn’t enough to be consistent (disk errors).

May I query which exact operating system did you use? Debian aarch64?

Ubuntu released a version last December that fixed the 64-bit problems pi4 has been having (USB and RAM issues primarily).

https://ubuntu.com/blog/updated-images-of-ubuntu-for-the-ras...

Been meaning to do this, but with root on NFS, not USB.

Yeah, this is what I do. The Pi 4 has Gbit ethernet, so potentially faster than any device you can connect, and with 4 GB of memory most of the stuff you're running stays cached in RAM, so there's effectively no latency issues and additional memory requirements for a simple server are negligible. It's a great solution.

I wish there was a M2 SSD port

You should probably go for an Intel NUC or equivalent if you need an M.2 SSD, since it's probably massively overkill for the Raspberry Pi.

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